BTW I ran the firefox I built with export LDFLAGS="-Wl,--hash-style=gnu". It starts in less then 4 seconds (cold start). And restarts in less then 3 seconds. Then I installed the latest firefox in our repos. It seems to start about a second and a half slower in both counts. This is a pretty slow box (1 ghz Athlon thunderbird, 512 MB ram) using VL5.9x.

And the package was the smallest yet weighing in at 6.9MB. Maybe the old hash values really do take up more diskspace.

Okay. The gimp version that comes installed is 2.2.15. So I went to our vl5.9 sources and downloaded the source and original (I'm assuming) slackbuild script. To keep the test fair I didn't change anything other than add:

Quote

export LDFLAGS="-Wl,--hash-style=gnu"

to the top line and edit the output name of the package so I could tell the packages apart.

To be honest I couldn't really see much difference in load times of the two packages. The one I made with --hash-style=gnu MIGHT load a half of a second faster.

I did initial startup so gimp could setup the prefs. Reboot. Cold start. Close. Warm start. I started my times from execution until the 3 windows were loaded. So there should be some human error.

Gimp installed= 6 seconds cold, 5 seconds warmGimp rebuilt = About the same numbers, maybe a half second faster on both tries.

1 ghz Athlon Thunderbird, 512 MB ram, VL5.9x XFCE

It would seem that this confirms rbistolfi's thoughts about the plugins.

But... I did test something else. The gimp installed was a .tlz package. I'm assuming there was a repack of the original .tgz to save disk space. So I repacked the gimp .tgz that I had built. There is a slight difference in size. Perhaps another way to squeeze more onto our ISO's?

Right now I've got both 5.8.6rc2 and 5.9Pseudo1 installed. (VL64-5.9Pseudo0.1 goes on the Gateway this weekend ) In a way it's a shame 5.8.6 was dropped because it pretty much was ready for prime time if you didn't include Beryl. The only bugs I've seen:

1. Grub -- didn't label partitions correctly and didn't choose correct partitions or kernel/initrd images for other Linux partitions. I had to boot into VL and manually edit my /boot/grub/menu.lst

2. X Configuration -- Installer set my resolution at 800x600 even though I specified 1024x768. Every 5.x release has done this and I get a small desktop surrounded by black on my Toshiba laptop. I had to manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix this. Nothing new here.

That's it and it's a pretty small list. I didn't install Beryl since I knew it was a problem child.

Why bother? PERFORMANCE! With the newer kernel and whatever tweaks were done KDE simply flies even on my nearly five year old Toshiba laptop (1 GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM). 5.8.6rc2 is faster than 5.8 SOHO. That, plus pretty much all the patches/upgrades to 5.8 SOHO are already installed. rc2 has some newer versions of apps and tools than rc1 as well.

Anyway, that's my take on 5.8.6rc2. I'll use 5.9 for testing and, obviously, to build packages. My working installation, though, will be 5.8.6rc2 until 6.0 is ready for prime time.